Rackspace appears to be working hard to live up to its newly adopted corporate tagline as the "open cloud company". The firm has released informally blogged news of two new software development kits (SDKs). One kit is focused on Java and the other is focused on PHP; both SDKs are equally directed towards helping developers create applications that will use OpenStack open source services.
The company's Wayne Walls has gone back to basics and explained that inside Rackspace's cloud, each service provides an API so that the service itself can be controlled programmatically. To assist developers, Rackspace provides the new SDKs for working with these APIs with their accompanying API bindings so that programmers do not have to use the REST API directly.
Each SDK provides documentation to help users get started with it, along with tested, working sample code that developers can use for their applications. The Rackspace cloud SDK for Java leverages the jclouds open-source library. It has support for OpenStack Nova (Rackspace Cloud Servers) and OpenStack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files).
"The Rackspace Cloud SDK for PHP uses the Rackspace-developed php-opencloud library, which supports Nova, Swift, Rackspace Cloud Networks (preview access), and Rackspace Cloud Databases," writes Walls.
Both of these SDKs are open-source and open to public contributions. Rackspace says it is working on "extending the SDK support" to the remainder of its cloud products as well as producing SDKs supporting other languages such as Python and Ruby.
Walls finishes by saying, "Rackspace is excited to be involved in these open SDK communities and is dedicated to improving the developer experience for everyone that wishes to build on open clouds. We look forward to collaborating with you and continuing to deliver world class SDKs that allow you to do more faster, build applications that change the world, and put you in the driver's seat of doing great things personally or for your business(es)."
